Pages

Ka-Boom!

Dan Barker is a former protestant preacher turned atheist, now the head of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I stumbled onto this clip from YouTube, where he purportedly admits to an "intelligent designer".

Phil Fernandes is supposedly debating the validity of the Big Bang by querying how an "explosion" can produce order. Dan Barker totally took the bait, which is a shame because the question is a red herring, and a perfect example of the stupidity of creationists. The Big Bang was not an explosion at all; it was the expansion of the fabric of space-time from a quantum vacuum. Stephen Hawking demonstrated mathematically 30 years ago how the universe could have arisen from a quantum field of virtual particles (the closest thing to "nothing" that there is).

Secondly, explosions can, in a roundabout sense, produce order. Here's something to ponder: every time a star explodes in a supernova, it seeds the galaxy with the heavy elements required to form life. Neil DeGrasse Tyson puts it best, even poetically, at 2:15 in this video:

Creationists are always looking for a way to undermine scientific inquiry with fallacious rhetoric. Don't fall for it.